Art - Kathryn Hughes finds that the Victorians differed little from us in their response to nudity

When it comes to titling anything to do with the Victorians, there is a tiresome tendency to lean on the image of dark secrets being brought to the surface. Hence "Exposed", the exhibition of Victorian nudes at Tate Britain, which suggests that all kinds of repressed desires and hidden fantasies are about to be dragged into the clear, unflinching light. And yet, as the curators make clear in the exhibition notes, the 19th century saw nothing wrong in viewing, analysing, imagining and reproducing the naked body. Indeed, Victoria herself, along with Albert, was a huge fan and collector of English nudes, keen to enlist the genre as a means towards defining a national figurative style. Far from banishing the naked body to the borderlands of pornography, Victorians as eminent as Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Tenniel remained consistently engaged in putting it on show.

This is not to say that the Victorians did not find themselves struggling with difficult feelings about the naked human form. The opening room in the exhibition is full of tableaux in which quivering flesh has been pressed nervously into the service of religious or moral themes (bare breasts are permitted only as long as they belong to someone in the Bible). By the 1850s, secular historical and literary subjects begin to appear - Lady Godiva and A Midsummer Night's Dream are favourite choices for the way they offer a wider range of possible and defiantly ungodly bodies.

By the 1860s, the revival of interest in Greek sculpture allowed painters such as Edward John Poynter to abandon narrative, leaving monumental naked human forms to dominate the canvas without any need for excusing scene-setting. A study of two young men from 1872 is called simply Paul and Apollo, leaving the viewer to work out what is meant to be going on (nothing very much, in fact). Borrowing subject matter from the classics was a way to dodge charges of impurity or voyeurism while still luxuriating in the pleasures of perfection, especially male perfection, that chimed so conveniently with the century's growing interest in health, hygiene and social evolution (or eugenics by any other name).

The most coherent section of "Exposed" is the room dedicated to treatments of the Pygmalion myth. Ovid's account of the fastidious sculptor who falls in love with his perfect creation gave Victorian painters the best reason to try their hand at the classical female nude, while also allowing them to reflect upon the whole process of making art out of living, breathing human bodies. The result is a range of readings, with Pygmalion both coolly curious and wracked with lust, either master of a big art class or holed up in a tiny studio. Galatea, too, changes according to whether it is Burne-Jones or Tenniel who is imagining her: chilly and indifferent to her rapt creator, or rosy with interest and quickening life.

By the end of the 19th century, the nude was wearing more clothes, and so had a correspondingly greater power to shock. (Philip William Steer's 1900 portrait of a naked woman wearing a black hat seemed obscene to viewers precisely because her unlikely headgear pointed up her nakedness.) Influenced by Manet and Degas, British artists now attempted a naturalism that placed women in various shabby domestic settings, hinting at sex savoured or still to come. Models lounged in deckchairs reading books, washed themselves, or simply stretched in the sun, forcing the spectator into the uncomfortable position of peeping Tom.

Inevitably, there were embarrassed protests throughout the period, as viewers found themselves disturbed by their own erotic responses to artworks that were supposed to be chaste. In 1867, for instance, Alphonse Legros's Cupid and Psyche caused a panic when Psyche's heavy languor seemed too obviously post-coital. Three years later, anxious male spectators insisted that Burne-Jones withdraw his Phyllis and Demophoon because Demophoon's genitalia had shrivelled worryingly in response to the onslaught from an overpowering Phyllis. And then there was the incident when Frederick Wallace was instructed by his prim patron to add a towel to cover the naked groin of a figure at the centre of his 1867 composition Bathers.

So the Victorians had exactly the same response to the nude as we do today. They enjoyed it most when its eroticism was safely contained. When it became mixed up with desire or violence or decay, they began to get edgy, lashing out at the painter for his obscenity. "Exposed" is a cogently arranged exhibition that manages to show both chronological development and thematic coherence. It is misnamed, suggesting a tired polarity between sanctioned and forbidden image-making. Instead, as shown by contemporary responses to the paintings in the exhibition, those difficult debates often took place in front of artworks that had already been designated as fit for public consumption.

"Exposed: the Victorian nude" is at Tate Britain, London SW1 (020 7887 8000), until 27 January 2002

Kathryn Hughes's most recent book, George Eliot: the last Victorian, is published by Fourth Estate (£8.99)

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